Alexander Graham
Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the
son of Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds, daughter
of a surgeon in the Royal Navy. His mother, who was a portrait
painter and accomplished musician, began to lose her hearing
when Graham (a name that was used by his family and close
friends) was twelve. His father had a world wide reputation
as a teacher and author of textbooks on correct speech, and
as the inventor of "visible speech," a code of symbols
which indicated the position and action of the throat, tongue
and lips in uttering various sounds. Melville’s Visible
Speech helped to guide the deaf in learning to speak and Graham
became an expert in its use for that purpose.

Graham
and his two brothers assisted Melville in public demonstrations
in Visible Speech, beginning in 1862. At the same time he
enrolled as a student-teacher at Weston House, a boys’
school near Edinburgh where he taught music and speech in
exchange for being a student of other subjects. A year later
he became a full-time teacher at the University of Edinburgh
while studying at the University of London.

In
1866 Bell carried out a series of experiments to determine
how vowel sounds are produced. He combined the notes of electrically
driven tuning forks to make vowel sounds which gave him the
idea of "telegraphing" speech. In 1870 his brothers
died of tuberculosis and his family moved to Brantford, Ontario,
Canada to a healthier climate. A year later Graham moved to
Boston where he opened a school for teachers of the deaf and
in 1872 became a professor at Boston University.

Bell’s
interest in electricity continued and he attempted to send
several telegraph messages over a single wire at one time.
Lacking the time and skill to make the equipment for these
experiments he enlisted the help of Thomas A. Watson from
a nearby electrical shop. The two became fast friends and
worked together on the tedious experimentation to produce
sounds over the "harmonic telegraph." It was on
June 2, 1875, while Bell was at one end of the line and Watson
worked on the reeds of the telegraph in another room that
he heard the sound of a plucked reed coming to him over the
wire.

The
next day, after much tinkering, the instrument transmitted
the sound of Bell’s voice to Watson. The instrument
transmitted recognizable voice sound, not words. Bell and
Watson experimented all summer and in September, 1875, Bell
began to write the specifications for his first telephone
patent.

The
patent was issued on March 7, 1876. The telephone carried
its first intelligible sentence three days later in the rented
top floor of a Boston boarding house at 109 Court Street,
Boston.